The Terrans

by Jean Johnson

  On a military station in the Empire, while the common crew quarters might boast some personal artwork images, most of the interior would be utilitarian. The stations might have a little more leeway, but a quarantine section would not have nearly so many pleasantries. Ja’ki had an explanation for that, too. She and Robert, the short black-haired male, were demonstrating how to work the kitchen equipment while they cooked, but the actual work took longer than the explanation of it.

  “I can understand why you’d be puzzled over the expense of decorating this place and making it comfortable,” she said in answer to his question. “You see, it was decided long ago by our psychologists that people who had to be put into quarantine isolation would fare a lot better if they had pleasant surroundings. And they were right; pleasant, comfortable surroundings ensure the quarantined individuals emerge in a much healthier state of mind than those who are deprived of such seemingly insignificant comforts.”

  “Healthy emotions and healthy thoughts help encourage healthier bodies,” Dai’a offered somewhat shyly. She and Li’eth were sitting on tall chairs in the kitchen, but while Li’eth was merely listening, the life-support officer had volunteered to chop vegetables. Some of which were familiar, the ones which his people knew were Before Time foods.

  Ma-ree’a, their medical doctor, had appropriated the help of the second pilot, Brad—an easy name—in taking swab samples from everyone and in processing them in the medical lab at one end of the isolation unit. Lars and A-yinda were assisting Shi’ol, V’kol, and Ba’oul in the quarters positioned along the upper deck, helping the newcomers learn how their quarters’ various facilities worked. As much as he wanted a real bath and a full set of clean clothes, including soft-sided shoes that would be comfortable to wear after so many days of being naked from his scalp to his toes, Li’eth wanted information. Well, information and food.

  Except his hostess would not explain anything other than fairly trivial matters since she said she did not want to have to repeat the important things over and over just because a few of their guests were missing from the conversation. For the moment, it was just the four of them . . . and whoever might be watching on their camera systems, he knew. Had their positions been reversed—and probably would be—Li’eth could admit his people would be watching, analyzing, and dissecting everything their own foreign-yet-familiar guests were doing and saying.

  For now, he followed her and Dai’a’s line of reasoning with a nod. “That’s a saying among the Sh’nai Holy Healers, who are the equivalent to your emotion doctors. We have psychologists as well, but the Holy Healers are a bit more . . .”

  “Holistic?” Dai’a supplied, knife pausing while she looked up, before she bent her attention to her task. She seemed familiar with a good number of the unprocessed food items, though some were downright exotic to both of them. Then again, Li’eth only knew the basics of cooking; for the vast majority of his life, someone else had always done that chore for him.

  Since that was the word he was looking for, he nodded. “Holistic, and more spiritually oriented. They are often preferred over the nonspiritual ones.”

  “We’ve separated a fair bit of religion from our own medical practices,” Ja’ki murmured, stirring something in a pan. Robert was busy chopping vegetables with Dai’a’s help, intending to make something he called a stir-fry, whatever that was, but Ja’ki was the one handling the meat dish.

  The scents coming from her efforts were sweet yet savory, with a bit of vague familiarity to the meat. She stirred the food with her right hand and arm, dancing a spatula through the contents while sporting a thick dark band on her right wrist. Her left hand gripped the handle on the pan, utensils and actions that were essentially the same for V’Dan chefs.

  Every single one of them, Terran and V’Dan alike, now had a similar band, a thicker, more complicated monitoring bracelet. Apparently, they had foods that could cause medical problems if someone was somehow sensitive to the contents, and the doctor wanted to make sure no one would suffer any problems, natives as well as guests. He couldn’t imagine what sort of food could cause such problems and still be considered edible as a whole. Back home, there was a clear line between what was considered safe to eat and what was not. He tried not to let it cloud his opinion of these people, reminding himself there were always things that one just had to put up with from a particular colonyworld.

  He wanted to ask her how her people ended up separated from the Empire but suspected she would avoid the question. Instead, Li’eth commented on the things he had seen. “If I didn’t know we were in medical isolation, I would think we were enjoying a sort of . . . a cabin? The sort of building one could rent and use in a wilderness area, save that this wilderness is not found on any planet.”

  “Yes, I would never have expected all the art,” Dai’a agreed. “The food certainly is wonderful—picked and prepared fresh instead of trapped in packets.”

  “Oh, we have plenty of those,” Ja’ki warned her. “If anything upsets your bodies, you’ll go right back onto the original packets that gave you no problems. And aside from eggs and the occasional fish, all the meat will be frozen or in canisters, and you’ll get the fish fresh only because gutting a fish is far easier than gutting a chicken.”

  “Chicken . . . chick . . . chika!” Li’eth exclaimed softly. “That’s what I’ve been smelling.”

  Dai’a nodded. “I smelled it, too, and so many of these plants are very similar to what we use . . . How can our foods be so similar, and our bodies, too? Are you a lost colony?”

  Li’eth shook his head, answering before the Terrans could. “They have too many people to be a lost colony. There are no lost colonies. The Empire has carefully kept track of every expedition into space. These people are the descendants of the Before Time people, the ones who did not escape the great disaster yet clearly survived it anyway.”

  She peeked at him from under her brown curls. Unlike many V’Dan, her jungen had not colored her scalp and thus her hair. “You believe that these people are the members of the Lost Motherworld of the Sh’nai faith?”

  “The prophecy about the Salik War, about finding allies came true, so why should there not be a kernel of truth in even the oldest of holy fables?” Li’eth offered. “If these people are the descendants of those who were left behind on the Before World, then that would make sense that they would have similar foods to our Before Time types, animals and plants alike. Roughly ten thousand years would not be enough to evolve many differences, other than maybe a lack of jungen, since we know that came along after arriving on V’Dan.”

  “You know, we are standing right here,” Robert quipped dryly, scooping vegetable peels into what looked like a composting jar. He lifted his tanned chin. “Why don’t you try asking us where our various species come from, rather than arguing whether or not we’re from some lost holy world or some lost space colony?”

  “Where do you come from?” Dai’a asked, taking the bait as she pared the last of some odd, orange root vegetable into thin oval medallions. It was supposedly a ca’ot, but the vegetable Li’eth knew was a rich purple, not luridly orange.

  “Earth. Our species evolved on the planet we’re currently orbiting,” the pilot asserted. “We have genetically backed paleontological records of all our plants and animals spanning millions of years.”

  Li’eth sat back, gesturing at the pilot and the Ambassador. “There you go. They are the Before People, the ones who were abandoned to their fate when the World Was Wracked, and the Chosen People were taken to the Promised Planet.”

  “That sounds rather rude,” Robert muttered, helping Dai’a scrape the medallions into his big bowl of mixed vegetables. “You make it sound like we were rejects. Maybe it was your people who were the ones put into exile, hm? And for that matter, who arranged your exile from Earth? And when?”

  “It is currently the year 9507 in the Empire,” Li’eth explained. “At some point in the month of Sember, which is either harvest or planting season,
depending on which hemisphere you’re in. So the when was nearly ten thousand of our years ago, though I cannot say in how many of yours. As for the how, the holy texts speak of how the High One, knowing that a great cataclysm was coming, spent years searching for the perfect new world. Once she found it, she prepared a citadel to house Her chosen people, and shipped many of the fruits and beasts of the field to that citadel in advance, before evacuating everyone She could get to move when the disaster struck—in other words, a carefully planned d’aspra.”

  Ja’ki choked. Coughing, she cleared her throat a few times, then asked, “Did you just say diaspora?”

  “D’aspra,” he corrected her. Then blinked. “What does your word mean? It sounds very much like ours.”

  She exchanged a look with her unmarked colleague before answering. “I suspect it means the same thing. The diaspora originally meant a dispersal of a particular ethnic and religious group, the Jews, from their holy land in a region we now call the Middle East, when conquerors came in and changed all the rules, effectively exiling them—I’m not up to date on all the details,” she dismissed, pausing to clear her throat again while she stirred the food in the pan, “but basically the word means an exile to foreign lands . . . which, if your people were moved from our world by some means ten thousand years ago, means you were exiled. Except that word in our language has only been in existence a few thousand years at most.”

  “And you said chika earlier,” Robert pointed out, rising from his rummaging through a cupboard, a curved, bowl-like metal dish in his hands, one with two handles on the rim. “Which sounds like our chicken. But that shouldn’t be possible because if you parted company from Earth ten thousand years ago—never mind how anyone on Earth ten thousand years ago could have had any sort of interstellar technology back then—then how could you speak what sounds like an English word, the base language behind Terranglo?”

  Li’eth and Dai’a both smiled. Gesturing toward Dai’a, Li’eth let his life-support officer answer the short, markless male. “. . . Because even V’kol, who refuses to believe in Immortals and Saints, knows that in the holy stories of the Sh’nai, the High One was sent back thousands of years through time to find, select, and protect the Chosen People. The V’Dan.”

  The looks Ja’ki and Robert gave them were bemused, amused, and disbelieving. Ja’ki shook her head quickly, the wisps of her dark reddish-brown curls bouncing a little. “Time travel is impossible. You can only go forward; you can never go back.”

  “The Feyori can,” Dai’a informed her. “They are the only race that can achieve the squared speed of light. They are energy beings, not matter beings like us, or even the Salik,” she added, picking up the cutting boards and knives to take them to the sink for cleaning. A lot of the fixtures might look a little weird to the V’Dan, but some things were just too common not to figure out easily. “They are very strange, very old, and very powerful. We call them the Meddlers.”

  “Energy-based?” Robert asked, heating up the round dish on some sort of radiant cradle and drizzling what looked like oil into the thing. “You mean, they’re like a . . . a big pulsing ball of light?”

  Dai’a shook her head, taking her time scrubbing the utensils. There was surely some sort of dish-cleaning machine, but no one had showed them how to use it yet. Even Li’eth knew the basics of washing dishes by hand . . . thanks to his time as a juniormost ensign on his very first ship.

  “They are more like a great, silvery, mirror-smooth soap bubble. I was told by some Solaricans that the darker they are, the more hungry they are, because they are trying to absorb ambient radiation like we would eat or drink food. Electrical energy, stellar radiation, magnetics, thermal, you name it. And if they are silvery-bright, reflecting everything around them, then they are full and not hungry. But I do not know much more beyond that about their, ah, physiology? Is that the word?” Dai’a asked over her shoulder. “The way their body-forms work?”

  Ja’ki nodded. She stirred her own dish a bit more, then helped her companion steady his pan while he added the vegetables, stirring rapidly with a wooden spoon as the oil sizzled and delicious smells wafted up out of the bowl thing.

  “How very odd,” Robert said, shaking the pan and stirring its contents.

  As Li’eth watched, Ja’ki pushed a few buttons and covered her dish, then turned to the oven-thing and pulled out delicious-smelling loaves of bread. Bread was bread was bread. Robert leaned that way and inhaled, then sighed and grinned.

  “Fresh-baked bread . . . or at least a facsimile of it,” he explained. “The station’s food-services crew pack up loaves that are almost cooked, then freeze them so they can be baked warm and finished—we’re not allowed to make our own in quarantine, as the yeast culture would have to be dead on delivery. No live-culture foods are allowed outside of digestive microflora tablets, but we can still have the near equivalent of fresh-baked.”

  “Tell us a little bit more about these Fey-yor-ree, and the other races,” Ja’ki suggested as she moved the pan to the countertop. He didn’t know what her name meant in her own tongue, but ja’ki meant bright stone in his. A bit like the polished-to-a-shine granite rectangle she slid the bread onto, set between her and Li’eth. “Wait—one moment, please, while I call the others to supper . . .”

  She moved off to touch an intercom button by one of the doors. Li’eth eyed the bread, wishing he could just reach over and pull off a piece. The rules for proper behavior and etiquette had been drilled in him from an early age. Dai’a, however, had no problem. As soon as she finished putting away cutting board and the knives, the logistics officer returned with a serrated knife, sawed off an end piece, and stuffed it into her mouth, chewing. She gave her captain a shy, mischievous smile as she did so.

  “Would you please cut me a piece as well?” Li’eth asked her, giving in to the delicious smell. Nodding, she started separating that loaf into pieces. The look and the texture suggested a grain at least somewhat similar to iit. Biting into one of the rounds, he discovered the taste was very much like iit, if with a slightly odd, sour tang to it. “Mmm,” he sighed, chewing and swallowing. “This is really good. Almost like home, but exotic at the same time.”

  Robert, still stirring and cooking, filling the air with a rich, peppery scent as he added herbs and spices to the vegetables, chuckled at that. “Everywhere you go, food is home to some and foreign to others. That version is what we call sourdough. Nearly every corner of the world has some form of grain or starch that forms a bread, whether it’s a risen bread, a flatbread, a cracker . . .”

  “Thank you for cutting up the bread, Dai’a,” Ja’ki said as she came back to the group. She did so by swinging past a refrigeration cupboard, pulling out a couple things, and grabbing some dull-edged knives, the sort more suitable for spreading than cutting. “Here is some butter, and strawberry, blackberry, and orange marmalades—fruits sweetened and jelled for preservation. The chicken is stir-fried in rosemary, garlic, and thyme. And now you can tell us about the other races you know about.”

  “Well . . . at the moment, you know we are at war with the Salik. Or rather, they chose to go to war with us. And the Feyori . . . they are impossible to capture, impossible to stop, but they don’t tend to interact directly, so much as they just . . . meddle. They have holy powers like you and I, but on a scale unseen anywhere else, and they can take on matter-based form,” Li’eth explained. Only to be given more skeptical looks. “Dai’a is right; they are the only race that can achieve the squared speed of light, where energy and matter can be exchanged form for form. The fastest we can push our ships is the tiniest fraction past the speed of light, compared to that.

  “Those are the enemy and the neutral races. The others are members of the Alliance. The Chinsoiy are perhaps the strangest of those who are our allies,” he stated, accepting the dish and utensils Dai’a passed to him. “The rest are based upon the element of carbon as our primary component, and we breathe oxygen, but while the Chinsoiy breathe oxygen
, they rely upon silicon as their primary element.”

  Robert turned off his heating cradle and brought over his dish to a different stone rectangle, next to where Ja’ki was setting hers. “How is that even possible? I’m not a chemist, but I thought that silicon reacts so much more slowly than carbon in chemical interactions. Comparatively speaking.”

  “They require types of radiation that would sicken and kill most V’Dan after moderate exposures,” Dai’a told him. “Most of the other races, too. The Salik are being careful not to destroy too much of our colonyworlds in the attempt to leave our infrastructure intact—they are amphibious by birth, but they can use dry-land things like we do—but the Chinsoiy, they just bomb everything from orbit if they can. They are . . . how to describe them . . .”

  “They have heads and torsos, and have two legs and two arms,” Li’eth said, serving himself, “and in that much they are like us, bilaterally symmetrical, with eyes and mouths that can form V’Dan word-sounds, but the arms have extra-long fingers along the undersides, attached all the way down to the bottoms of their legs by large flaps of skin. Their homeworld gravity and atmospheric pressure are such that they can glide for distances, and I think the flaps also allow them to absorb enough radiation over the surface area provided to help the Chinsoiy with their metabolic processes.”

  “They mine a lot of rare ores and radioactive elements and their manufactured components for the Alliance,” Dai’a explained. “They live easily twice as long as a V’Dan, maybe a little more than twice as long, and they are not always easy to understand, but everything living needs to eat, and everything sentient and advanced as a civilization needs tools to be created. There are things we can do which they find difficult because the manufacturing processes require nonradioactive environments in the earliest stages.”